Creationism: another casualty of Innumeracy

Some of us who sincerely treasure the scientific fact and scientific theory of evolution have brought on some of our own problems with our choice of nomenclature. For instance, sometimes “random mutations” gets uncoupled from natural selection, leading some to believe that it is the randomness of the process that is the be-all and end-all of evolution. Consider also Francis Crick’s description of the associations of amino acids with their three base codons as a "frozen accident." Creationists, ignoring these (legitimate) scientific and scientific/poetic usages, have jumped all over the terms such as "random" and "accident" to characterize scientific evolutionary theory in the following warped way: "All life forms just suddenly spring into existence as accidents." Though I am aware that sophisticated creationists would embellish this attack, this characterization is certainly the straw man put forth by most of the people out there who tremble at the thought that human beings are (gad!) animals. It recently occurred to me that, perhaps, creationists’ willingness to assume that evolutionists are claiming that complex life forms "just happen" might be another symptom of "innumeracy." It might be that they don't understand how incredibly rare it is that biological "accidents" survive and reproduce. In his bestseller, Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences (1988), John Paulos introduced the term “innumeracy” to refer to "an inability to deal comfortably with the fundamental notions of number and chance." Paulos bemoaned that innumeracy "plagues far too many otherwise knowledgeable citizens."

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The joy of subsumption

All my life I’ve been suspicious of the alleged power of syllogisms.  Here is an often-cited syllogism:

• All men are mortal
• Socrates is a man
• Therefore Socrates is mortal

Syllogisms can be expressed in this logical form:

• All B’s are C
• A is a B
• Therefore, A is C

The above example is a perfect syllogism: the conclusion naturally follows from the premises.  Syllogisms constitute deductive reasoning (from a given set of premises the conclusion must follow).

Many excellent thinkers and writers have stressed the need to present one’s arguments in terms of syllogisms.   For example, in his excellent book on legal writing, The Winning Brief, Bryan Garner advises lawyers to frame every legal issue as a syllogism (see p. 88).

But what is really behind the power of syllogisms?   It turns out that they are actually based on a metaphor—the metaphor of objects in a box.  Consider this diagram in tandem with the classic syllogism (“All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal”)

syllogism.JPG

As Judge Posner points out (in “The Jurisprudence of Skepticism,” 86 Mich L. Rev 827, 830 (1988)), the first premise presents a box labeled “all men,” in which each of the contents are each labeled “mortal” and one of those objects is labeled “Socrates.”  Posner notes,

“The second premise tells us that everything in the box is tagged with a name and that one of the tags says “Socrates.”  When we pluck Socrates out of the

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Failure To Communicate

There are some (usually unacknowledged) semantic disconnects ("failures to communicate") whenever theists and Atheists argue. Neither side responds as though they were aware of the unstated fundamental assumptions of the other side. Here are some of these for your consideration. For Atheist and Ignostic consideration: Theist's perceptions of atheism (as…

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